I just found out that the tv service I was having installed is fiber optic tv and that TiVo doesn't work with it. I have a few questions for this community about what my possibilities are.

I have an old tv that would need a convertor box and the new digital rabbit ear antennas and I tried hooking up those 3 things to my series 2 TiVo. But it wasn't ideal for TV watching in the end.

So my dad bought me a premiere for Christmas. From what I understand I won't need the convertor box with that TiVo right? And I will still need my rabbit ears right? So TiVo, TV and rabbit ears right?

My other questions are about a slingbox. If I get one of those, how does it work? My mom has cable tv and Internet and a spare tv and said I can hook everything up there if I want. So would I have the slingbox and TiVo hooked up at her house and then I control everything from my house through my computer?

Also between the TiVo series 2 and the premiere what are the advantages? I don't have an HD TV so I wouldn't need that. I ask because the series 2 has lifetime service and the premiere doesn't have any service and if it would do the same thing for me then I would use the series 2 at my moms for the lifetime service. And then sadly let my premiere box collect dust until we move out of this stupid house in the boonies.

Once our Internet is working again today I do plan on hooking the premiere up with to the tv and rabbit ears and at least see what the quality of the channels are. If everything works I would monthly on it!

Oh. I just had an idea. If the premiere does work then I could still hook up the series 2 at my moms and get the cable channel tv shows.

Thank you in advance for any help/insight you guys can give. I know this was long and I'm sorry!

You didn't say who the fiber TV provider is. I know Verizon's FiOS service works well with TiVo HD and later models, and I believe that's true of AT&T's UVerse service, too. The installer or provider might just not know that, or might prefer that you rent their equipment instead of using your TiVo.

It's CenturyLink's PrismTV. Both CL/Prism and TiVo said fiber optic didn't work. I thought that Verizon and Prism were both fiber optic and I had found some info on Verizon working with a TiVo.

Do you know if its sort of an unknown thing that it works and its sort of a YMMV thing? Or did I just get people on both ends who didn't know (TiVo) and didn't want to say yes? And CenturyLink is my DSL provider. </p>

I was trying to do research on PrismTV to see what type it was and I couldn't find anything helpful and thought it was digital cable.

And our Internet has been down for 2 days now and so I can't even get through guided setup on TiVo to see if the over the air channels will work better now! There was a tech out here today and he said "you've never had Internet here have you? There's no wires in your box." I told him we've had it for 2 years and he said oh well I'll get it on and then it started pouring down rain of course and he's gone now.

Sorry for the bad news. I've done some Google exploring, and since Prism TV doesn't use CableCARD the way cable companies are required to, and Verizon FiOS does because they want to, it's not compatible with TiVo.

I have a similar setup to what you're trying to do. Essentially, I have an antenna on the roof connected to a Tivo HD and a Tivo Premiere. In my case, both of those TiVos are connected (via HDMI) to an HDTV. I don't know if Tivo will automatically transcode the ATSC coming from the antenna to NTSC for your non-HDTV. I think it does, but I'm not certain.

To determine which channels you'll get over the air, I recommend looking at antennapoint.com. There are other sites that do similar things, but I find antennapoint's interface to be the most user friendly.

As far as the slingbox goes, it really depends on which one you get. I have a slingbox pro-hd at my mom's house. That device has multiple tuners in it: NTSC (for basic cable), ATSC for antenna, and QAM for free digital cable. I hook it up directly to her cable. I do not use a converter box. This limits the channels that it can receive to only things on non-digital cable, and a few free digital channels. The free ones are the HD versions of the broadcast channels. If I wanted to, I could get my mom to purchase an extra digital converter box for her account and then I could get everything she gets. But at this point, I really only want it to be able to watch my college sports games. And those are usually available on the local broadcast channels. She's about to move to florida, and then I'm going to be outta luck. I'm going to have to find a friend who's willing to put up an antenna so that I can continue to get those sports.

You should note that your Tivo S2 only has an NTSC tuner. So the TiVo+slingbox at your mom's house would likely get fewer channels than the appropriate slingbox at your mom's house. Of course this limits you to only watching live events. So there's that.